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nonconstant

81 karma · joined January 26, 2016

Building better devtools with Evil Martians and better WebSockets with AnyCable.
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nonconstant··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
Kudos to RubyGems team for handling it, but open source fighting off the AI lab-powered robots is completely unfair.

OpenAI should at the very least donate large sums of money to everyone they attacked.

nonconstant··on [dead]
Key growth stories and hacks, the agentic flywheel, and ratings of VCs and angels by investment thesis, partner names included.
nonconstant··on [dead]
Hey! I started using web presentations recently, so I went ahead and built something super fun - a plugin (for Slidev and Reveal.js) that adds interactive slides: ask a question and watch answers coming in, in real time. People scan a QR code and respond from their mobile browsers. It's powered by the free version of our product (AnyCable, I'm a co-founder) - but AnyCable is also MIT licensed, so no vendor lock. It just guarantees that with under 2000 people in the audience, it's gonna work smoothly. I tested it on audiences over 1,000 and also on zoom meetings. It's pretty cool. Ask a question (multiple choice or free input), create a whole quiz. We don't have persistence yet but I'm super open to suggestions for sure!

Also my first npm package ever (thanks to CC, but jeez I'm not a TS dev for sure, but, you know, people and robots helped).

Here's a demo (with explanation and live questions): https://slide-quiz-demo.netlify.app/

Repo: https://github.com/anycable/slide-quiz

nonconstant··on Matz 2/2: The trajectory of Ruby's growth, Open-Source Software today etc.
Ruby is #5 most used and #3 most loved programming language in the Pragmatic Engineer survey 2025: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...

It means that basically, Ruby is huge in the SF Bay thanks to its adoption by startup founders, but it is a lot less popular outside of the Bay Area.

nonconstant··on Ruby 4.0.0
Also: lots of other big Ruby shops are on Sorbet, like Figma, One Medical, Gusto etc. We discussed this at the SF Ruby meetup after this talk https://www.rubyevents.org/talks/past-present-and-future-of-...
nonconstant··on Ruby 4.0.0
Stripe is using typed Ruby: they are authors of https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet
nonconstant··on [dead]
We're gathering in San Francisco to learn from, build for, and celebrate companies choosing Ruby and Rails for new products today. Come and join the pragmatists and idealists who enjoy writing Ruby.
nonconstant··on Wes Anderson shot a movie in San Francisco [video]
Or, his fans did!
nonconstant··on YC Founders and Ruby Friends at SF Ruby Conf
yay!! amazing ♥
nonconstant··on YC Founders and Ruby Friends at SF Ruby Conf
agree
nonconstant··on YC Founders and Ruby Friends at SF Ruby Conf
thank you
nonconstant··on YC Founders and Ruby Friends at SF Ruby Conf
It's the first Ruby conference in the Bay since 2014, and it has a unique focus on startups. If you want to see companies choosing Ruby and Rails for new products today, join in!

We're sponsored by Chime, Bolt.new, Cisco, Gusto, Intercom, Temporal, Omada Health, Avo and many more. sfruby.com

nonconstant··on Ask HN: Are startups still using Ruby on Rails to start new products/projects?
If you are building a painkiller not a vitamin, then Ruby and Rails ecosystems are great to build for. Existing businesses earning billions and news startups that choose pragmatism. Join the community to learn what the pains are. I’ve been surveying news Ruby startups and sharing results at conferences to learn what’s is the missing open source and tooling that we should build, see for ex https://www.rubyevents.org/talks/startups-on-rails-in-past-p...
nonconstant··on Ask HN: Are startups still using Ruby on Rails to start new products/projects?
Have you used Stripe, Figma, Gusto, Chime, Shopify, Github, Intercom or bolt.new? They all are built with Ruby as a major part of the stack.
nonconstant··on Ask HN: Are startups still using Ruby on Rails to start new products/projects?
Join the SF Ruby conference to meet dozens of new startups building with Ruby and Rails: https://sfruby.com/#startup-demos
nonconstant··on How to power-up Rails with Go, C or Rust, preserving the productivity of Rails
Rails excels at business logic, developer happiness, and rapid iteration. Still, there comes a moment when performance bottlenecks emerge, and the typical refrain is: “rewrite in Go,” “extract to microservices,” or “break up the monolith.” But there’s a better way: scaling your Rails app by upgrading to heavy-duty tools, while keeping the recipes in Ruby.
nonconstant··on Building Modular Rails Applications: A Deep Dive into Rails Engines
There's a new data point: Ruby is #5 most used and #3 most loved language as per the recent Pragmatic Engineer survey! https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...
nonconstant··on Ask HN: What is a great project based Rails tutorial for 2025?
It’s the official new Getting Started but ported to a browser-based runtime powered by WebContainers, so you can complete the whole tutorial without having to install Ruby or Rails. It’s very cool!
nonconstant··on The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What's in your tech stack?
Ruby coming at #3 Most Loved and #5 Most Used is dope. I read it as: people you should care about are on Ruby + Rails, today.

Bring on those missing Ruby SDKs and Active Record drivers!

And join us at the San Francisco Ruby conference in November (sorry for self-promotion but I’m very happy to see this).

nonconstant··on Show HN: Ruby on Rails tutorial running in the browser
I'm excited about this!
nonconstant··on Building Modular Rails Applications: A Deep Dive into Rails Engines
We're experiencing a global peak of Ruby meetups (globally). About 800-900 meetups in the last 12 months as per https://rubyconferences.org/meetups/ I'm hosting probably the largest Ruby meetup in San Francisco, see https://lu.ma/sfruby

Rails is not at the peak of visibility (like it was in 2008-2014), it is not a "default stack for new products" but here's what we see: Rails startup just did a large IPO (Chime), another Ruby startup filed for IPO (Figma) Rails startup just posted a record ARR growth (bolt.new)

Lots of startups and lots of success stories. See https://evilmartians.com/events/startups-on-rails-in-past-pr...

Again, not the #1 or "default" choice, which is probably a good thing, because we are past the hype+disappointment cycle and on the pragmatic side of things.

nonconstant··on CFP and Call for Startups, SF Ruby Conference 2025
We opened CFP and Call for Ruby Startups for the new San Francisco Ruby Conference: sfruby.com dates: November 19-20, 2025 location: Fort Mason, San Francisco Join us!
nonconstant··on Simple Declarative Presence for Hotwire
Just shipped: add user presence tracking to your Hotwire apps with a few lines of code! No complex JS—just drop in <turbo-cable-presence-source> and let AnyCable do the heavy lifting. See who's online, count active users, and we're already building more for simple declarative collaborative experiences.
nonconstant··on Ruby on Rails on WebAssembly, the full-stack in-browser journey
I think it's cool for a few reasons: – we can wrap Rails apps with Wasm for demo purposes, it can be a cool step to see what's inside before you're ready to install anything – we can run apps on Wasm for added security and isolation
nonconstant··on Ruby 3.4.0
You can also check out the type checker by Ruby built by Stripe https://sorbet.org/
nonconstant··on Ruby 3.4.0
Also, you can check out the list of UI libraries for Hotwire https://hotwire.io/ecosystem/ui-frameworks
nonconstant··on Ruby 3.4.0
Ruby is optimized for developer happiness, and it is not a small thing. Ruby on Rails is optimized to build successful web application businesses as a highly efficient team. It minimizes boilerplate code, and thus, time to market, while giving guidance (the Rails Way) on how to design for growth and scale.
nonconstant··on Ruby 3.4.0
It's not just the well-known GitHub, Shopify, Chime, Figma, Zendesk, Convertkit (Kit), Coinbase etc. See the "few" companies here, actively hiring Rubyists for no reason https://rubyonremote.com/remote-companies/ Square, Gitlab, Cisco, Figma, Instacart, Block, Calendly, 1password, and so on
nonconstant··on Ruby Video – On a mission to index all Ruby conferences
I'm super grateful to folks for this. It's one of my favorite websites now.
nonconstant··on Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
Ruby on Rails community is so lucky to have Nadia
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